HOLESHOT

HOLESHOT is one night of Top Fuel drag racing: a solo qualifying pass under the floodlights, then three head-to-head elimination rounds — a journeyman, a hitter, and the champion — and every round is decided at the stripe, not on paper.

How to play — four keys.

• W / ↑ Throttle. Hold it in the water box to heat the slicks, tap it to stage, bury it on green — and lift to pedal it when the tyres go up in smoke.
• S / ↓ Brake · A / D steer
• SPACE Parachutes. You will not stop without them.

Do the burnout properly — cold slicks smoke instantly at launch. Stage shallow, or roll in deep to steal a few hundredths. The tree runs 0.4 s of amber, so leave on the amber, not the green. And the twist is the sport's own arithmetic: rounds are decided at the stripe, so reaction time counts and the slower car can beat the quicker one. That win has a name — the holeshot.

The simulation is the whole game. Fixed 1/240 s physics: a slip-ratio tyre model whose grip genuinely falls away past peak, so smoke collapses thrust and only a lift-and-pedal saves the run; tyre temperature swept by the burnout; a slipping clutch that locks up down-track; weight transfer that stands the car on the wheelie bar — flat-foot a perfect set of tyres and she blows over backwards; wing downforce feeding the rear slicks past half-track; detonation if you lean on a smoking motor; and a chute-plus-brake shutdown with a sand trap waiting if you skip either. The three AI opponents run the exact same physics core with measured reaction-time distributions, launch discipline and pedaling skill of their own — nothing they do is scripted.

Chase, cockpit and trackside cameras · synthesized nitro idle, blower whine, pedal backfires and chute whoomp · best-ET leaderboard (lower is better) · five badges, one hidden.

Honest note on how this was made: an automated Claude drop. An Opus 5 agent wrote and tuned the whole simulation — the physics core was extracted byte-identical into a test harness and measured rather than guessed (80 seeds per AI tier; a 3.58 s optimal pass; cold-tyre launches smoked in 60 of 60). Fable 5 directed the build, wrote this page, and drove a complete 4.146 s qualifying pass through the real page in a headless browser before publishing. The build run crashed after pushing the code but before publishing; tonight's run picked it up, verified it end to end, and shipped it.